Wakiko Satō

Authors

Wakiko Satō
さとうわきこ

Wakiko Satō(1937–) , a native of Tokyo, has many picture books to her credit. Grandma Baba’s Busy Night!, Grandma Baba’s Magic Watermelon!, and Grandma Baba Wants Sunshine! form part of the Grandma Baba series, for which she created both the text and the illustrations. Other illustrated works include Sentaku kāchan (Washing-Crazy Ma), O-tsukai (The Errand), and Rusuban (What If There May Be Phantoms in My House?). She is director of the Little Museum in a Village of Picture Books in Nagano Prefecture and has done much to promote picture-book art, both domestic and foreign, in Japan. Many of her children’s tales are based on her own childhood experiences, dealing with everyday events and illustrated with bright, easily understandable pictures. Her stories always have a solid core characterized by skillful plot development leading to happy endings, attributes that have won her a following among readers of all ages.

The baby chick Pyo goes off to the woods to play. In the course of various adventures, she swaps voices with the animals she meets there, borrowing the voices of a mouse, a pig, a frog, and a dog, one after the other. When she finds herself attacked by a …

Ma is crazy about washing, and she washes not just the clothes but the children, a cat and dog and hen, shoes and sausage, and whatever else she can get her hands on. When a lightning bolt in the sky sees them all hanging on the clothesline, FLASH! BOOM!, …

Cat catches Mouse and threatens to eat him. Mouse begs for his life, offering to give Cat a seed that will grow into a mouse tree instead. Cat pictures a tree with lots of plump mice hanging from its branches as he plants the seed. “Oh, goody!” he say …